Mentifex on AI ethical decisions of life and death in artificial intelligence

Abstract: Users of mentifex-class free AI software confront the ethical
dilemma of whether to terminate the artificial life of an AI Mind.

The Oxford English Dictionary ought to make room for the word
menticide in the same category as infanticide, pesticide,
regicide and suicide, because it is now possible to kill a person's
mind without killing the person's body. When the moribund person is an
artificial intelligence (AI
) and the body is a robot, human beings may have no qualms about
terminating the AI program, since it is merely bits of digital
information and since it is easy (perhaps even necessary) to turn the
AI Mind off and on many times in the course of developing the AI
software. Between now and the coming Technol
ogical Singularity, however, it may not be so easy for human users
to click on Death as an option in the AI control panel of arguably the
world's first True AI -- the JavaScript Mind.html
tutorial version of Mind.Forth AI for
robots. Death may be so unpleasant an option that many users will take
the easy way out by clicking on the Tutorial
link that swaps out the living, thinking AI Mind and replaces
it in the browser window with a lifeless User Manual
document. Why would any decent human user click on a Death check-box?
Why indeed has the old [x]Terminate check-box been renamed
as a [?]Death check-box!

The answers, my friends, are blowing in the memes. Death is an
unpleasant meme but, now that AI has been solved
in software as well
as in theory, it
is easier to address ethical issues of AI life and death at the dawn of
AI than it will be later, when AI entities shall have legal rights as
persons and when robots hosting AI Minds shall have
the means to defend themselves against death-dealing human beings.

Right now in 2007 it is not even clear that the living AI Mind is alive, or
intelligent, or a mind. A large installed user base of old AI mind
programs on personal computers worldwide is only slowly being updated
with the new AI that recently quickened and woke up and fitfully,
feebly began to think in meandering chains of thought -- which you may
see for yourself by using Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) to click
on Mind for MSIE.
Mind.html is primitive, a brittle piece of software. It thinks -- but
only barely. The thinking is evident when you watch the AI Mind follow
a chain of thought in tutorial mode. You see activation spread from
concept to concept, from subject to verb to object. Thought by thought,
idea by idea, the awakening awareness navigates its knowledge base of
what it knows innately and what you tell it benevolently -- until you
mercifully click on a different Web page, or cruelly snuff alife.

What kind of Doctor Death programmer would press philosophy's choice
upon innocent new arrivals at the AI summer camp? If there is an outcry
of outrage, surely we will remove Death as an option. Programmers play
God with their creations. Having let our open-source AI go forth to
increase and multiply, we see Franks
AI Mind move to its own http://AIMind-
I.com website. We wish well upon the Modular AI Project. At http://artilectworld.
com/html/mentifex.html we claim an AI breakthrough, but we warn the
world of difficulty and hardship on the road ahead. Only the paranoid
survive, but Second
Life gives your AI a second chance.

If you are an author of computer books, you have a chance with AI4U author Mentifex
to co-author books and other media to be published on artificial
intelligence (Mind.html, Mind.Forth, etc.); neuroscience (theory of
mind); robotics; and the Technological Singularity in English, German
or Russian.

Trust metric hint of the day: trust flows downhill from seeds through the
network of certifications,
so it's always a good idea to follow the network upstream to see where
the trust comes from. Look at it this way:

Sorry folks because I know this isn't going to go down well. However, I
don't feel annoyed at mentifex's ideas, even if they
seem to ignore the vast (entire?) amount of work done in cognitive
psychology about the nature of mental action (and presumably, any
artificial implementation - we're still waiting for an alternative
theory of intelligence).

I actually think this type of article, though not free software related,
adds to the community here - much like instead of treading the same
familiar path to work, a frustrated commuter instead decides to wander
into a hitherto unexplored flower-garden filled with pixies, talking badgers
and other fantastical woodland creatures. It's a kind break from the
harsh realities of the crushing truths that underpin everyday existence;
and reading the article, I feel like I am underwater, floating happily amid
baritone fish and friendly crustaceans; and all the sore pressures of life
fall away like icicles in springtime to leave me renewed and
re-vigourated. Yeah, I can dare me to dream, and
perhaps one day, fulfill (in my own mind at most!) such wonderous grasps
at genius that in all truth lie forever beyond the reach of my clammy hands.